Service providers such as credit card companies and insurance companies routinely record telephone conversations with customers. The recordings are a record of the conversation that may later be used to verify information obtained during the conversation or to provide evidence where there is a dispute regarding the substance of the conversation. A reciprocal recording facility, however, is not readily available to the individual caller who calls the service provider. At best, an individual caller may record the conversation using home recording equipment attached to the telephone. The ability to record such telephone conversations is therefore limited to individuals who own home recording equipment and have set up the equipment to record telephone conversations. There is therefore a need for a consumer telephone service providing individuals with the ability to record telephone conversations on demand without investing in and setting up home recording equipment. There is also a need for such a service for businesses that do not wish to invest in a recording system of their own but would record using a network-based service.
It is known in the art to record an audio conference call by connecting a computer to one of the ports of an audio bridge carrying the conference. In contrast to a point-to-point connection between subscribers through a local central office or a main switching station, a connection over an audio bridge mixes multiple inputs and feeds back a composite audio to each station through ports on the audio bridge. U.S. Pat. No. 5,710,591, entitled “Method and Apparatus for Recording and Indexing an Audio and Multimedia Conference,” discloses a system wherein the audio switching capability of an audio bridge is used to identify speakers during the conference and to create an indexed recording of the conference including the identity of the speakers. Audio teleconferencing, however, must be set up well in advance, is expensive and is unavailable to many telephone subscribers. Recording a telephone call using a signal from an audio bridge is therefore not a viable solution for individual subscribers wishing to record occasional telephone calls made over point-to-point connections using the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN). As used herein, a “point-to-point” connection is a physical or a virtual connection directly linking stations over wires, coaxial cable, fiber, wireless transmission, microwave links, satellite links and switching/central office equipment. In contrast, an audio bridge links multiple stations over a mixing device.
In order for a recording of a telephone conversation to be effective as evidence in a dispute, the authenticity of the recording must be provable. For example, it would be useful to have the details of a call, such as the date, time and duration of the call, the calling number and the called number, to be available for retrieval in association with the recording. Home recording equipment would not be likely to have the capability to associate information such as date and time with the recording in a verifiable manner. Furthermore, in many cases, custody of the recording and the associated data by either the individual caller or the called party would render the integrity of the recording suspect. A party may also wish to document the refusal of another party to permit the recording of a communication. There is therefore an additional need for an individual caller to be able to authenticate a recording of a telephone conversation by verifiably recording relevant data associated with the conversation, and for custody of the recording to be with an uninterested third party to the conversation.
There is a need for a secure and trusted third party to authenticate the caller and the called party number and to provide secure archive storage for the recorded conversation. Furthermore, it would be desirable to distribute a digitally signed copy of the conversation including the associated information in one of several standard audio formats from a secure server via e-mail, downloadable from a universal resource locator (URL) on the secure server, or from the secure server in a streaming audio format.